Sonnet 29

Question 1

Poet

Answer 1

Elizabeth Barret Browning

Question 2

Context

Answer 2

-Browning wrote the poem in 1845-46 about her then lover, and future husband, Robert Browning.
-Deeply personal, and was meant to be a private poem but he encouraged her to publish it, and so she did so within a collection called ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’ – pretending that she had translated the poems from Portuguese. Nobody fell for the story.
-There is a joyous religious undertone to the poem. She compares him to palm tree: in Christianity, the palm tree represents faith.